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What are typical fraud types?

Modified on: Fri, 3 Nov, 2017 at 11:11 AM

Financial fraud

Monitoring non-credit card fraud is important. One particular case involved a soldier having his military ID stolen. Thieves used 20 different addresses in 6 states and opened 65 separate accounts. He incurred $265,000 dollars in damage in four months.

Medical fraud

Stealing your medical identity is one of the fastest growing forms of identity theft. In America, 47 million people don’t have adequate medical coverage, which provides a strong incentive for thieves to steal identities. According to the FTC, between 300,000 to 500,000 people have their medical identity stolen annually. Having your identity stolen can max out your health insurance lifetime maximum coverage without you even knowing about it. When your medical records get altered due to merging with an identity thief’s information, it is almost impossible to separate records. Doctors can end up making false diagnoses with faulty data. You could receive the wrong drugs, the incorrect blood type or a diagnosis of mental illness, thus creating life-threatening medical errors.

IRS fraud / employment fraud

There have been instances of identity thieves using or selling social security numbers to defraud the IRS. Victims end up owing thousands of dollars in back taxes to the IRS for an income tax return that wasn’t their own. Thieves gain employment using someone else’s social security number. In one case, the victim had her identity used by her former boss who applied for additional credit cards using the employee’s social security number. The employee was not aware she was a victim until much later.

False arrest

Having your identity stolen could land you in jail until you can prove that YOU are not the guilty party. The burden is on YOU to prove that you didn’t commit a crime. Child identity fraud We protect our children from physical harm but now protecting their identity is just as important. It is not uncommon for a child to be victimized at birth from records stolen from the hospital. There is no cost to the thief to “inventory” this personal data, so they can wait months or years before they decide to sell the information or commit the fraud. The child can become an adult before finding out their identity has been stolen.